Cyclical Nurse Scheduling in Shah Alam Hospital Using Goal Programming

Abstract

A shift work schedule is extremely important to obtain the optimum result of work allocation since it involves 24 hours of continuous services. Every nurse could not avoid shift work schedule since their services are very important towards the patients in the hospital. The major objective of the study is to propose a cyclical nurse scheduling in the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) at Shah Alam hospital using Goal Programming. It is to help the head nurse to spend less effort on building new schedules periodically and increase the satisfaction among nurses by providing fairness towards their schedules. There were nine hard constraints and three soft constraints for the nurse scheduling model. The results presented the optimal solution where all goals were achieved thus, it provided a fair schedule for 15 nurses in 15 days. Then, the schedule pattern was rotated among nurses based on the 15 schedules set in 225 days. The first schedule set will be used by the nurse for the first 15 days, then will be continuously rotated for another 15 days until all the nurses reached and experienced every 15 sets of the schedule. The schedule was generated using LINGO software which it took a short time to solve the problem.